What a great read, I definitely learned and understood a lot of perspectives.
Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
491–500 of 606 posts
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fear leads to a loss of freedom. When we're afraid, we give power to politicians that promise deal with it swiftly. Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking. Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it. Has the war on terror stopped? No? When do we get to hop onto a plane without undressing ourselves? Oh, but now there's a war against viruses? So you have to undres…
Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful. Back in the 60s-80s, the world managed to use the fear of pox to eradicate the disease from existence - and most did so by instituting a vaccine mandate. Back in the late 70s/80s, the world managed to use the fear of acid rain to ban sulphur emissions (LRTAP convention). In the early 90s, the world managed to use the fear of ozone to ban CFC…
Fear and logic can look the same from the outside when logic dictates caution. Do you "fear" fire? You understand it, and know what you can and cannot do with it. Yet your aversion to ever letting it exist outside of very tight controlled scenarios, and perhaps panic if you saw it spreading uncontrollably quickly, would look an awful lot like fear to somebody who didn't understand what fire was.
I think the main difference is that fear is an emotional response. And this important because emotions can often misguide us are also easily exploited. For instance, racism is often a product of fear. People see some group of people engaging in crime at a higher rate than usual, and start to fear all people of this group as criminals even when that fear and prejudice is completely unjustified. And tyrants since time immemorial have used "fear the other group" as a rallying cry for self righteous horrible acts in the name of a better tomorrow that never comes.
So in your examples is it primarily fear driving behaviors, or primarily logic/rationality?
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> speech should happen primarily on platforms that are prohibited from profit-seeking and run in the public interest. Censorship on these platforms should be prohibited, of course, but so should any form of profit seeking. No such platform has ever existed. How would you propose building one?
Many countries have public media organisations that are funded by taxes or a license fee, and run in the public interest without a strong profit motive. The BBC is a well-known example, but many countries have their own version. I don't think this is a solution though. These organisations are distrusted just as much as anything else.
The BBC is regularly censored by the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English...
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol exactly. This is why I try to remind myself to pay attention to how I and others may be feeling underneath, and have even dedicated my professional life to it, because I have honed very strong rationalizing skills. I find often the people who disagree with me the strongest can also go toe-to-toe with me in finding stories and evidence that confirms our beliefs and if I remember (and have the courage), I try to go…
What I find rampant these days is the rather extreme way of thinking “If you are not with me, you are against me.” And I think social media amplifies this, not only by algorithms, but also because text doesn’t provide good context (intonation, stance, emotional transference) , I mean we literally read other people’s thought in our own head, also those whose thoughts we are not congruent with. HNs rules are great in t…
“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”
— Ronald Reagan
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#495The funny thing is that everyone commenting here thinks that we're headed towards an authoritarian nightmare, but for different reasons. It's not until you sit with someone and nut out what they mean by "authoritarian" and "censorship" and so on that you realise you're completely morally and politically opposed to them. This shallow political take is what allows so many strange bedfellows to unite on the "political r…
Fear leads to a loss of freedom. When we're afraid, we give power to politicians that promise deal with it swiftly. Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking. Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it. Has the war on terror stopped? No? When do we get to hop onto a plane without undressing ourselves? Oh, but now there's a war against viruses? So you have to undres…
The difference is that terrorism in the US is a miniscule threat in reality, killing a handful of people a year, whereas the virus is one of the top causes of death over the past two years. Not all fears are unjustified. Climate change already kills far more people annually than terrorism via floods, fires, and droughts. That being said, fear doesn't justify authoritarianism, even when the fear is reasonable.
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has helped me to realize that most of politics is preference, and preference rarely need be informed by the scientific method, especially when most of our daily choices are preference based. E.g. who do I love, what should I wear/watch/eat, where should I spend my money, etc. Our culture has now taught a few generations that people get to decide their own truth, and they conflate preference for truth, and now we a…
"E.g. who do I love, what should I wear/watch/eat, where should I spend my money, etc." Ok, my feelings of love are not guided by a scientific method (except analyzing and reflect on what I feel). But by deciding what to wear, eat, watch etc. I do apply the scientific method. Meaning I test out systematically, what works best for me. And I try to teach this to my children.
The scientific method applied to preferences is probably not the scientific method (in regards to control experiments (unless you have clones and access to the multi verse:)))
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many countries have public media organisations that are funded by taxes or a license fee, and run in the public interest without a strong profit motive. The BBC is a well-known example, but many countries have their own version. I don't think this is a solution though. These organisations are distrusted just as much as anything else.
The BBC is regularly censored by the government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-injunctions_in_English...
That's the judicial system (not "the government") that decided that someone's privacy was more important than having their private life all over the street (which was hardly directed at the BBC, but more the tabloids).
You can of course argue about these things and where the balance should be, but most of these cases are little more than "some vaguely famous person fucked someone" and are not really "in the public interest" as such. Certain sections of the British press seem to think that you have no right to any privacy at all after you've appeared on TV two or three times.
To summarize that with "the BBC is regularly censored by the government" is quite misleading.
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
European perspective here: Trump was definitely trying to make himself a dictator, just look at how he handled losing an election. Please don’t vote him in again America. Agree on moral panic issues though.
If you read American leftist media from late 2020 to January 2021 you'll find a bunch of breathless editorials claiming that Trump was about to declare martial law and assume dictatorial powers. That was obviously nonsense and displayed a complete lack of knowledge about how the US federal government and military work.
It's lack of trust more than a lack of knowledge. See: the submission title.
I can see how this perspective seems reasonable if you've never been on the boot-end of unjust laws, but a lot of us over here on the left side of the center have good reason to doubt that the good parts of law and order can hold up against a sufficiently inspiring and intelligent dictator. Trump was a fool and squandered what he had. Someone will run with what he built and fumbled in the same way Obama ran with what Howard Dean built and fumbled.
This is actually why I'm wary of calls to abolish the Senate and Supreme Court. They suck when you want to get stuff done, but they also give us time to organize against people who want to install a dictatorship. Our tar pit of a system and people at high levels believing in it was the only thing that stood between Trump and the genocide he'd love to give large parts of his base.
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
Help me out. Watch Schindler's List (famous movie) and after, let us know if you still feel that, and in what ways how, the US is welcoming the successor of Nazi ideology. I'm not seeing it. Not even at a glance.
> how, the US is welcoming the successor of Nazi ideology. I'm not seeing it. Not even at a glance. The guys in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us"? A Presidential candidate (and later President) openly mocking a disabled person on stage? Said President who sees immigrants as a threat and has no problem being backed by literal white supremacists , antisemites and KKK members? Who made first popularity…
Still not seeing it. Nazis lined up people and shot them because of who they were. A literal economic machine was created to kill millions of people. But, hey, the president apparently mocked someone. Seriously? That is included in your comparison to nazis?
Re: Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I had this conversation with my daughter the other day. She was like "But ... they just think the same thing about what you're saying". I was like "Totally, the only difference is that I'm right, and they're wrong". She was like "how do you know?". That lead to a much longer session of reviewing types of biases and fallacies, the scientific method and various other critical thinking tools I've developed over the…
This is basically a less-polished exposition of GGP Grey's excellent video [1], which he also mentions in the talk [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
See also The Toxoplasma Of Rage: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage... and You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe